


the price of tears

by dawittiest



Series: the serpent under [3]
Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Abuse, Abusive Relationships, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Animal Death, Class Issues, Dark, Dubious Morality, F/M, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Introspection, Mental Health Issues, graphic descriptions of dead animals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-09
Updated: 2017-05-09
Packaged: 2018-10-22 18:12:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10702392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dawittiest/pseuds/dawittiest
Summary: a Maria Reynolds interlude





	the price of tears

**Author's Note:**

> Mind the tags/warnings. This story is disturbing in a way that none before have been.
> 
> (It doesn’t make much sense without prior reading up to Chapter 4 of _the serpent under_ so if you haven’t read it yet, go back and do that.)

The night she finds out, Maria locks herself in the bathroom.

She turns the faucet knob and watches the big tub fill up, listening to the steady strum of water. When she bought this place – nearing on six years ago, and it still hasn’t lost that pristine gleam of novelty which makes her feel she’s living in a Homes & Gardens spread, afraid to put anything down too hard in case it shatters – Maria imagined she’d have a bath every weekend and pretend she was that people. That people who discards satin robes like used tissues, soaks in mineral water cleaner than what most have to drink just because she feels like it, and never has to rush through ice-cold showers at five in the morning. Immerse in this fantasy, just for a moment. She knew that people, from innumerable coffees she served them and messes she mopped after them, almost as well as she knew the other kind of people. The people born with dirt under their nails, that life makes grow like mold on their flesh until they can no longer tell it apart from their skin. Whatever her bank account might say, Maria had no delusions which category she fell into. Falls into.

She hasn’t owned a bathtub, before. Bathtubs waste so much water. Showers are more economic. But she had money then, for the first time, and she thought… She never uses the bathtub, just like she never uses the – _expensive_ – bath oils that smell of sandalwood Aaron Burr gave her for Christmas two years ago. Like she never lights those candles she bought that are supposed to calm nerves.

She lights them now. She fills the bathtub with water near the point of overflowing and generously pours the expensive bath oils that smell of sandalwood and a hint of lavender, and lights up every candle. There’s a relaxation tape in her nightstand drawer she got after the divorce and listened to maybe once; she puts it on. Then she turns her back firmly to the mirror and strips with quick, efficient movements.

She forgot something. Wine. She hesitates— but there’s no one here, is there, to say no to her. Not anymore. So she tiptoes naked to the kitchen. She tries not to notice her own reflexion in the smooth chrome surfaces flickering in the corner of her eye. It’s been years but Maria long lost hope she would ever be alone in her skin. Her body aches with bruises that healed badly and those that sunk deep into her bone marrow, phantom touches like stains she can’t get out. She’s used to it, so her hand only shakes a little when she pours herself a glass of white wine. The good one. If she’s doing this, she’s going to do it right. If that’s one thing she does right.

Steam is hanging over the bath when she returns. Just as she likes it. Maria lowers herself into the tub, careful of the wine. The water licks with tongues like flame at her thighs, pools in the folds on her stomach. Maria imagines she can see soap suds rip off the dirt from her, particle by particle. Or maybe it has mixed up in her head; school feels very long ago and it’s not important. She imagines it all the same, the sweat from work and filth that clings to her skin being peeled away until she’s left clean, a white canvas. Like – she stutters for a moment over a fitting metaphor – like baptism.

Maria’s never been particularly religious. If she thinks back hard enough, she remembers her mother’s calloused hands wrapped around a rosary. Stiff white collars itching her in the neck. And the hymns, that always had a tinge of sadness. There is an illustrated children’s Bible in the reading nook that so long was the only nice book she owned. The parables and the story of Jesus of Nazareth bored her but Maria liked looking at the colorful pictures and she liked the sound the thick pages made when she turned them.

James wasn’t particularly religious either. He wore a cross around his neck but he forgot to go to the church on Sunday and he didn’t like Maria going without him. Didn’t like her going anywhere without him. Maria didn’t fight him. It felt like a small concession, then.

God, it’s good wine. But when she swallows, bitterness lingers on her tongue that doesn’t come from alcohol. Maria closes her eyes, trying to close this train of thought with them but she can’t help _knowing_. The math comes to her with practiced ease; she’s learned it by heart during those long evenings spent hunched over the kitchen table, swallowing a helpless scream lodged in her throat, adding over and over again the amounts from the crumpled receipts she collected in a box under the sink and stolen from James’s jacket after he’d finally passed out in front of the TV. One bottle of good wine equals the advance for the rent for the next month, or the electricity bill, or new books for her daughter… She shakes her head. The math is sound but it’s wrong at the same time. What’s it called— faulty premise? She thinks that’s what it’s called. It held true in her old life, when those things were payed for with whatever was left from James’s disability benefits and Maria’s temp job, if he let her work that month, after her husband’s “investments” – whores and booze, and another shady business his friends were getting up to – but that hasn’t been the case for a long time. It hasn’t been the case since she was handed that first paycheck from Mr. Madison, the first paycheck that was wholly hers and hers only. In this brave new world, Maria can afford (she can _afford_ ) an occasional indulgence like expensive wine and pay her bills on time. No matter the box with receipts she still keeps under the sink that feels more real than the rolled-up hundred-dollar bills in her purse ever will.

She puts down her wine. Like baptism. Can baptism wash away sins that are yet to be committed? She doesn’t know. That feels like too big a mercy. A mercy she doesn’t deserve, she’s sure. Maybe to think so is blasphemy but her God has never been merciful. So Maria stopped praying and learned to live like this world is everything there is to life. And even if there is Heaven, she knows it’s no Heaven for her to go to.

Maria takes a deep breath and dunks under the water.

Warmth engulfs her, safe as a womb. Like this, she can’t help but think life wasn’t meant to leave the ocean. As long as she’s down here, no one or no thing can touch her. She wants to drift asleep and never have to come up. But the lack of air is pressing on her lungs and at last her preservation instinct wins. Maria emerges spluttering. She combs the wet hair from her face and shivers. The air feels too cold on her wet skin after that warmth so Maria sinks until her chin is touching the surface of water.

It’s a real nice bathtub. Comfortable; luxurious, even. So different from that rusty old shower in that shoebox apartment James and her moved to right after the wedding that always smelled like lead. No, not lead. Something fouler. It smelled like something died there. Unbidden, the memory floods her mind— hours spent perched on the toilet seat, staring at her chipped toenail polish and waiting for James to go to sleep. Listening. Thud, thud, thud. He moved like a wild animal in the woods. She listened. Sometimes he tripped over something, swore. But then the noises slowly died down and the apartment was quiet. That was the only time she felt at peace.

But the _smell_. Maria breathed as shallowly as she could but it still felt like she was inhaling some insidious, invisible kernel with the stifling air that germinated inside her into something slimy and awful. She always thought one day she’d open a cabinet and discover that something had crawled there and rotten.

She can’t stand the sight of dead animals. They haunt her unlike anything, not even human corpses. Perhaps it’s morbid of her to say but people dying never bothered her. Funerals and cemeteries were a constant in her childhood. One of her earliest memories is of her nana’s face the way it looked in the coffin, the features like half-melted wax congealed forever into a skewed grimace. Her sister flinched and refused to kiss nana’s clammy, cold forehead but Maria did not. She used to think she may become a doctor because of that. But that was ( _before James, before Maria realized she was too stupid for anything but her body to matter, before she has grown weary and disillusioned with the world_ ) before.

She remembers, years ago, a dead mouse on a cobblestone road. A neighborhood boy had mashed a pebble with his shoe to its tiny skull. She could see the brain matter coming out. “Stop,” Maria said. The boy smiled maliciously and didn’t stop. _What you do that for_ , she thought. _It’s already dead_. “You don’t have to look,” the boy said. “You can turn around and walk away.” But she couldn’t. She had to look. She was petrified.

She has this gruesome collection of dead animals she’s seen her life. She remembers each one, in graphic detail. There was a cat in the middle of a road she had to pass twice on her way. It was white and orange, with fresh blood sticking to its fur. Big. Beautiful. She remembers it rained that day. The sky was violet and it felt like she was all alone in the world.

Dead pigeons that were always run over on her street. One summer there was a new one every week. She twitched at the sight of their gray mangled bodies lying on the curb every time and she tasted cold bile that was so much worse than disgust, so much more visceral, that felt like her insides were on fire, like her throat would close up and she would choke on this fear. But she couldn’t look away. She had to see.

Maria read this book as a kid. She doesn’t remember much of it but one scene has stuck in her head. Just before they said good bye, a pair of lovers saw a dead white dove on the sidewalk. The woman cried. “It’s a bad sign,” she said. That stayed with her. A bad sign.

It’s probably time to get out of the bath, Maria thinks, despite that sinking deeper into the water. Her fingers must long have wrinkled like prunes. She wiggles her toes. The nails gleam, perfectly painted scarlet red. Maria had a girl do them last week. She has the same girl do her toenails every two weeks. Even in January. A shudder runs down her spine with each nail parlor receipt added to that box under the sink, her mind frantically crunching numbers, but— it’s not like it matters now. It doesn’t matter.

Once more she’s reminded of that shower. How she crouched under the stream – barely, it was so narrow she had to keep her elbows and knees to herself to fit in – and she cried quietly, hoping the rush of the water would dull it out. James didn’t like it when she cried. It was better like that.

“You don’t appreciate what I do for you,” James liked to say. “Other man would’ve long left your ungrateful ass. Would serve you well. But I put up with your shit and what’s my thanks? Everything you can possibly need, I give you. Wouldn’t hurt if you showed some fucking gratitude. Are you listening?” He’d grab her wrist and crush the delicate bones in his fist so she couldn’t escape. “You better be listening to me. You hear? Ungrateful, worthless woman.”

Maria would stay silent then but she knew. She knew she had to pay somehow. But what did she have to give? She could only crouch in that rusty old shower that smelled like something died there, trying to cry quietly, and think, _is this enough? Have I paid you enough in my misery? How much are my tears worth to you? Can I ever repay?_

She knows better now. The world doesn’t care about the price of her tears. But that was all she had so James was of course right. She was worthless.

 _I don’t want to go back to that_ , she thinks with sudden force. And if… if she did this, this thing she doesn’t have the courage to even voice in her head, she would have to go back. She’s living on a debt, a debt Mr. Madison never expects her to repay but she knows it’s not benevolence on his part. There is an understanding between them, unspoken out loud but just as binding, if not more, as any written contract. She is forever beholden to him. Maria doesn’t mind. She likes her place at Mr. Madison’s side. He has a certain fondness for her, she knows, but it wouldn’t do her any good if she crossed him. Especially when it comes to Mr. Jefferson.

Mr. Jefferson— Maria has known men like him her whole life. Men with sharp teeth and red-stained gums bared like they’d devour you tendon by tendon if it struck their fancy, broad shoulders and the wide spread of their legs taking up all space in the room with terrifying ease so alien to her, poisonous voices dripping honey from their forked tongues, slowly, without a care, assured the world will listen. Mr. Jefferson, frankly, makes the hair on the back of her neck stand up. But Mr. Madison? He’d smile at her and mean it, and break her spine without a second glance. Mr. Madison, she knows, is a much worse man.

She thinks about Sally Hemings, who has unknowingly thrown herself in his path. Maria has met her before. Mr. Madison likes to be informed of Mr. Jefferson’s all comings and goings (her job is to keep her mouth shut and do as she’s told so she never said anything but of course she _thinks_ ) and for a brief period of time those involved Sally. Maria didn’t like her. If she’s to tell the truth, Sally Hemings reminded Maria of herself when she was younger – that same sad tug to her lips, that same quiet voice she spoke, that same tired eyes not looking up from her hands twisted on her lap. But there’s something about her; a simmering fire underneath that Maria doesn’t recognize in herself, and it makes her wonder…

She thinks about Mr. Jefferson, his palm creeping to the small of her back and his gaze never trailing high enough to look at her face. She thinks about Sally Hemings, walking with her head bent low, the slope of her back like she’s thousand years old. She thinks about James, his sour breath and his fists digging black bruises into her hips. She thinks, and the heavy lump in her chest she thought long ago had been tempered into steel starts to crumble.

Maybe she would not mention Sally to Mr. Madison. Sooner or later the word will to travel to him but maybe… maybe it would be later. Maybe too late to stop Mr. Jefferson’s sins from coming to light. Maybe there is justice.

But then, then what? Maria feels it slipping through her fingers before she barely can grasp it. She knows how this story goes, doesn’t she? It leads to the dim-lit, claustrophobic midtown office in an early morning hour, the ghost-like brush of Aaron Burr’s hand on her trembling shoulder and his measured, gentle voice unable to soften the implacable words, “There’s no proof”. It thrusts her into a hurricane, flittering helplessly like a leaf toyed with by the winds from lawyer to lawyer, courtroom to courtroom, and after everything, all the time and money wasted, every half-healed wound and broken bone she had to reopen, it still comes down to her word against his. Maria with her useless tears against James with his loud voice. He always yelled. Never spoke. Under his sheer volume, Maria could feel herself growing fainter and fainter until she faded away.

And what good would her little act of rebellion give Sally Hemings? Mr. Jefferson isn’t James; Mr. Jefferson is an important man. Men like him, Maria knows, can do anything. Who cares about the legacy of pain they leave behind? And Mr. Madison… Maria feels the will crumble and die in her just thinking of him, like it did just thinking of James. Go against him? Her? She can’t possibly succeed.

She has to think about Susie. Her baby, her Susie, who only now started to laugh out loud. Maria has a good thing with Mr. Madison. She is grateful for it. He took one look at the poor girl that trailed after Aaron Burr and he gave her a chance. He didn’t do it from the goodness of his heart but Maria’s too old for righteousness. There are no good men but there is kindness and one wrong does not erase one right. God knows Maria is not a saint either. Her loyalty has more to do with her need to belong than any gratitude she might feel to him, so it’s only fair.

For a moment, she wavers. What would have happened to that poor girl if nobody had looked at her with pity, if Aaron Burr hadn’t seen the lines around her eyes instead of the low-cut of her dress and hadn’t offered her a payment plan for his aid? But Maria is not strong enough and she’s selfish. She never pretended to be anything other than that. And Sally’s tears, Sally’s words wouldn’t matter in the end. This is for the best.

Suddenly Maria stops and listens. There is no sound but she knows to wait for it. She’s like a cat that way, learned having spent long evenings stretching into nights sitting on the toilet seat and staring at her chipped toenail polish. Listening. She listens now; and then it comes, a scrape of the key wriggling in the lock. She stops breathing. Light steps, then a bag put down with a thud— _loud staggering, and a swear mingled with a clatter of metal on the tile floor_ — She closes her eyes, sinking, until the water dulls the noises out with its encompassing rumble. _“Maria?_ Maria! _What the fuck are you doing in there? You think you can hide from me, is that it? Don’t you walk away from me, bitch, I’ll teach you some fucking respect—”_

A knock.

“Mom?” Susie’s voice. “Mom, are you in there?”

Susie. It’s just Susie.

Maria searches deep inside herself and just manages to find a voice to call back, “Be out in a second, baby!”

“I’m gonna turn down the music, okay, mom?” Susie doesn’t wait for an answer. The steps recede and abruptly the relaxation tape seeping from the living room speakers cuts off. Maria blows out a tremulous exhale.

The water’s gone cold. She rubs the goosebumps off her skin, lingering, but it’s only delaying the inevitable. She knows what she has to do.

Maria stands up. She wraps a towel around herself and steps out of the bathtub. She pulls the cork out of the drain with a squelching pop. Blows out the candles. Rinses the wine glass in the sink. She hangs the wet towel on the radiator and puts her leaden limbs through the pant legs and sleeves of her pajamas.

Then she unlocks the bathroom door. Not once does she look in the mirror.

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve written the main bulk of it a while ago when I was in a bad place and decided to pour it all into writing. I really want to know what y’all think because I lost every last shred of objectivity I’ve had towards this story.
> 
> Your comments keep me going <3.


End file.
